“This is not a matter of a businessman making money from privatization.” The EU will lift sanctions on the former head of Yandex Reuters: The European Union will remove the co-founder of Yandex Volozh from the sanctions list 02/21/2024, 23:41

The agency reported that EU countries will remove Yandex founder Arkady Volozh from the list of legal entities and individuals subject to anti-Russian sanctions. Reuters He quotes three sources familiar with the situation.

“Volozh is one of three people who will be dismissed after March 15, when the sanctions regime will be extended. In the statement, it was stated that the EU sanctions regime is discussed and updated every six months.

Two other sources familiar with the situation had previously told Reuters that the legal arguments against Volozh presented in court were “weakened given the proposal to sell all the assets.”

The European Union has already lifted sanctions against businessmen with ties to Russia. So in September 2023, the EU excluded The list of sanctions includes Grigory Berezkin, head of the ESN group, Alexander Shulgin, former head of Ozon, and Farhad Akhmedov, co-owner of Northgas.

Volozh’s request

Volozh was included in the sanctions list in the summer of 2022, after which the entrepreneur left all positions at Yandex. On August 27, 2023 sent Request to EU officials to lift sanctions against him. According to sources close to the businessman, the businessman hoped that he could persuade the EU not to extend the sanctions. However, after the restrictive regime was revised on September 15, Volozha’s name remained on the blacklist.

December Bloomberg He reported that Volozh applied to the European Union Court.

“This is not about a businessman who made his fortune from a wave of privatizations and government contracts,” William July, a lawyer for Yandex’s founder, said during the hearing. The defense lawyer also noted that Volozh publicly condemned the SVO.

Volozh last August named He stated that the special operation of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine was “barbaric” and that he had “friends and relatives” in this country. “Although I have not lived in Russia since 2014, I understand that I have a share in the country’s actions,” he said.

Officially Web site Volozh describes himself as a Kazakhstan-born Israeli IT entrepreneur, computer scientist, investor and philanthropist.” There is no mention there that Volozh lived most of his life in Moscow.

To whom did they sell Yandex?

In early February, Yandex NV signed an agreement to sell its Russian business to a consortium of private investors and company executives for 475 billion rubles. The main owner will be the closed investment fund Consortium. Yandex executives will be the first to preside. Yandex emphasized that none of the buyer consortium members are subject to sanctions from Western countries.

The new parent company will be Yandex, an International Joint Stock Company (ICAO) registered in the Kaliningrad region. Under his auspices, all assets will be combined, except for foreign ventures (Avride unmanned technologies, Nebius cloud platform, Toloka crowdsourcing platform and TripleTen education service) and a data center in Finland.

Arkady Volozh founded Yandex together with Ilya Segalovich in 2000. In June 2022, Volozh resigned as CEO and board member of Yandex NV.

Yandex company has been registered in the Netherlands since 2007. Volozh currently holds an 8.5% economic stake in Yandex NV through a family foundation, but has no voting rights in the company.